Thursday, September 03, 2009

The Wall Street Journal conducted a fascinating, yet highly tedious, study on Major League Baseball announcers recently. Writer David Biderman, watched every team's home broadcast, and for a half inning he tallied how many words each announcer spoke. After that he average that out to words per minute to come up with your winners....or losers depending on how you look at it....

Obviously there are a handful of factors that go into this number, but the main one is how much each PbPer's color analyst talks. Vin Scully obviously doesn't have one at all, which is why he's at the top, but the rest of this sort of makes sense. At least it does in my market, where Gary Thorne's analyst (Jim Palmer), doesn't ever shut up.

And 84 of Vin Scully's 143.51 words per minute are devoted to a cute 5-year old Dodger fan falling asleep in his nachos that the cameraman cut to.

Just kidding, Vinny, we love you. Even when you talk about children too much. Even during those terrible years when Jeff Kent and Matt Kemp caused you so many troubles. I can't believe he's retiring after next year. They need to rename Dodger Stadium after him.

I would have thought Niehaus would have been lower because I've heard a lot of dead-air when he's announcing. Might have depended on how fast the pitchers in that inning worked. Although if it was in the third inning, there's that Aflac trivia question he's got to deal with.

He doesn't do the play-by-play (thankfully), but Red Sox post-game NESN hack Tom Caron is an unpleasant Tsunami of verbiage. He'll ask a question that takes a minute to get out of his mouth, and he then tramples on the person he asks the question of (which is usually Dennis Eckersley or Jim Rice). So the media hack steals the microphone from the professional baseball player. I knew sports media hacks were in love with themselves, but not to this extent.